3.4. Lesson 16: Appreciate Your Ignorance
Just as he made use of success as well as failure—the first provided data on what worked, the second yielded equally valuable information on what did not work—Edison found that knowledge and ignorance were of comparable if not equal value. Whereas knowledge pointed the direction in any given research project or experiment, saving time and effort by allowing the experimenter to focus only on the most likely approaches, ignorance opened the mind by obliging the ignorant experimenter to try every conceivable approach. To be sure, this was labor-intensive and time-consuming, but it also multiplied the possibilities of making new, unexpected discoveries.
Ignorance both invited and necessitated pure empiricism—the ...
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